


exhibit a

by MourningPluto



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Humanstuck, M/M, Oral Sex, Sexual Content, and some dick suckage also, dirt poor roommates, hand stuff, lots of dicks is what i'm getting at, sad boys and handjobs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-12
Updated: 2013-03-12
Packaged: 2017-12-05 02:14:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,419
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/717682
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MourningPluto/pseuds/MourningPluto
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>you are dirt poor.</p><p>but you weren't always.</p>
            </blockquote>





	exhibit a

You are dirt poor. 

But you weren’t always. 

Your fingers (bony and thin and pale) are slightly paler in the places where rings used to be. You used to wear dozens of them, clunky and ostentatious all over your hands. But you had to pawn them off to make rent. You've had to pawn off a colossal amount of shit to make rent. Most painful: MacBook. Most pathetic: your dignity. (So, yeah, that was how you ended up giving your landlord head for fifty bucks. No, it’s not a rumor. It’s totally true. You have officially turned tricks to make rent, that’s how fucking poor you are.) 

Again, you weren’t always. 

Basically you’re poor because you dropped out of college. Basically you dropped out of college because you spent most of your time smoking weed with the other history majors and talking about philosophy more than the kids who actually took philosophy. Basically your dad cut you off. Basically you’re a fucking idiot. 

So now, you are dirt poor.

So is your roommate.

Living in New York is expensive as fuck. No one ever shows that on TV. Rachel and Ross have these big, beautiful apartments. Rent-controlled, the lucky bastards. Technically you’re pretty sure New York has some kind of law about rent control, you don’t fucking know. You just know that you live on the shit side of town where no one gives a good-God-damn about rent control. Or locks that actually work. 

(You frequently sleep to the cacophonous sound of gunshots.)

You have a roommate and you’re still ramen-noodles, clipping coupons, turning tricks poor. In part you (know) suspect that this is because he won’t pawn off his laptop. The thing absolutely has to be worth nine hundred dollars, you know, you know nice things when you see them. He won’t pawn it off. So in defiance you’ve decided to keep the TV. Which is still a piece of shit, and is positioned rather precariously on top of a reinforced cardboard box. 

Both of you work. You would probably strangle him with your bare hands if he didn’t. You would probably enjoy it. He’s employed at some call center, you know because he bitches, all the time, like you’re married or something, bitches about anything and everything under the sun. Apparently, it’s awful; that’s all you know. (You also know that he has to wear khakis because his boss told him that it makes a better impression than denim, which you guess is pretty stupid on account of how he operates on the phone. Oh, and you also know that his bathroom breaks are timed. And you ALSO know that he’s forced to read a script, even though his computer expertise far surpasses that of the pre-written program he’s expected to read through. From what you understand, troubleshooting is trouble. He makes that real clear.) 

You don’t feel bad for him, though, because your job is worse. For one thing, you don’t sit on your ass all day staring at a computer screen; you’re a waiter. You are a proud employee at The Big Catch, a squalid little seafood joint that takes forever to walk to, from the subway, and is never, ever worth it. Consequently, you smell like fish. Your best friend mans the front desk; she doesn’t smell like fish. Your manager (blind old bitch - even though she’s a year younger than you) wears a sickening amount of perfume that makes you want to die; she doesn’t smell like fish. You are the only person you know who reeks of maritime corpse. 

Glub fucking glub. 

The Big Catch is a big failure, and a big lawsuit waiting to happen, so you usually come home with burns on your hands from the half-melted plastic plates on which your lucky clientele greedily consume their nearly rotten seafood. (That’s the thing about The Big Catch, all the food is nearly rotten, including - you suspect - the pre-frozen PB&J sandwiches for picky little asshole kids who can’t suck it up and order fishsticks like everyone else.) If your customers weren’t as ass-broke as the people working there, you think someone would have sued by now. But only rich people have lawyers, and based off the fact that nobody tips, you’re pretty goddamn sure that no one who eats at The Big Catch is rich.

You’ve toyed with the idea of suicide, but the unfortunate fact of the matter is that you’re too lazy. If you ever came across a container of pills, you’d sell them on the street long before checking the label to see if they were deadly. If you had silverware that wasn’t made of plastic, you’d pawn that, too. You have a pen-knife that you sort of used to use to write words on yourself (whore, failure, asshole, fucker, Eridan) but you’ve dropped the habit for the most part. Also, you can’t find your pen-knife, which makes you think your roommate sold it, the bastard. 

So one day you come home and you just want to sleep, because it’s a fucking Friday and Pyrope decided to forgo being a conniving bitch for once in her life and gave you Saturday off. When you have days off, you either sleep or you drink. And you’re hung-over, so you definitely don’t want a double mobius reacharound hangover, as your roommate so succinctly dubbed it one Sunday afternoon. You use the phrase even though you have no idea what a mobius is. 

You decide to sleep. Sleep is nice. As far as you’re concerned, you’re a hell of a lot more useful asleep than you are awake. Hell, who knows, maybe when you’re sleeping your roommate throws wicked parties and has all kinds of sex and okay, who are you kidding, he sits and type-type-types like he always does. You’ve grown to hate the sound. Your MacBook was quieter. 

When you come home from work, the first thing you notice after jimmying your practically defunct key into the lock of your apartment is that he’s - for once - NOT typing. 

This is suspicious by itself.

Paired with the somewhat guilty (or at least troubled) look on his face, you’re damn alarmed. What the fuck did he do, anyway? Set something on fire? Get caught downloading illegal music/movies/games/everything? As it stands, he’s sitting on the couch, with your TV playing what you recognize as America’s Next Top Model in the background. In other words, he’s not watching.

“So I take it you knew I was comin’ home,” you inform him. 

“How could I not? I could practically smell you coming from, like, Rum Street.” Rum Street is the colloquial name for a nasty little area you unfortunately have to walk through from the station on your way home. Also, he doesn’t say “smell” or “station”; his esses are afflicted by an unfortunate lisp that he, unlike everyone else ever, didn’t seem to outgrow. It’s worse when he’s mad. 

“What did you do?” you ask him. You slam the door shut behind you as hard as you have the balls to, which isn’t actually that hard, really. If you slammed it any harder, you might cause actual damage, and if you caused actual damage, it’s probable that you’d have to do a lot more with Equi-sweat (your nasty nickname for the nasty landlord, who isn’t even that bad, just gross, hardly even his fault he was born like that) than you have in the past. Either that or suck a lot of dick. 

But you slam the door because you like drama and you like danger. You hope your neighbors upstairs hear. 

“I sold your bed.” 

You look at him and the first thing you wonder is if he’s crazy, if he’s stupid, if he’s high. You know he isn’t any of those things, except maybe crazy, but more likely than that he’s just one sad motherfuck living with another sad motherfuck. You don’t really think he’s crazy, and for that matter you don’t really think he’s stupid. You also don’t think he’s high; if he were, his eyes would be bulging from behind those shades of his, and his mouth would be running a mile a minute, or trying to encompass yours, sometimes both at once. He’s no pothead; his drug of choice is crushed-up Ritalin. This addiction is something you really wish you could pawn off. That would be nice. 

“Are you crazy?” you ask him. You give him a real reproachful look, the worst you can manage, and continue. “Are you stupid? Are you high?” 

He informs you justly that he is none of those things, that he had to make rent and you’re just going to have to deal with it. 

The thing is, he sleeps on the couch. He doesn’t have a fucking bed either. 

“I have a sleeping bag in my closet,” you tell him. Basically what this amounts to is the two of you, in the middle of your goddamn living room, sleeping in one damn sleeping bag. As to be expected, at around two am you can feel his hand on your leg and you know he’s not asleep. His breath is in your hair. The sound of sirens echoes outside. 

He whisper-asks you if wanna fuck, which is about the least eloquent way he could have phrased it ever, and it’s not even fucking, what you two do, but you go ahead and say yes because you’ve had a bad day and his hands are always nice and warm. He palms you outside of your boxers and you shudder. He gropes you and you shake. He squeezes and you squirm. 

Your poker face is shit. 

Maybe it’s the fact that you’re in a fucking sleeping bag that makes him so affectionate; maybe it’s because the situation is so damn sad that you have to do something, anything at all, to keep from going batshit crazy at the sadness of it all. You are two broke jerks, splitting the heat on the carpet of your shitty apartment. 

He bites your neck like he’s a damn vampire and you almost come right then and there. 

Like you said, affectionate; normally he doesn’t even give a shit. He’s gonna leave a mark. An honest to God hickey. You could kill him, but you just moan a whole bunch instead. It covers up the sound of gunshots, though you still register them in your subconscious. 

Sollux is painful quiet, painful soft, painful gentle and you want to seethe. He always seems to be able to tell when you’re about to lose it, because that’s when he grabs you hard. Speaking of hard, he is. There’s absolutely no way it would go unnoticed, on account of how there isn’t a whole lot of room in this glorious piece of camping equipment, to the degree that your two layers are the only things keeping you from stealing fourth, if that is even a phrase people still use. 

You’d let him fuck you anywhere is probably the sad thing, but he’s polite and doesn’t say anything. 

“Shit,” he mutters, right by your ear, and you think about asking him why but decide that it’s not worth it. His strokes are sort of sporadic and it’s sort of hot. 

“You’re fucking loud,” he accuses, and that’s just too damn bad. You grit your teeth and almost elbow him until you remember that he’s holding your dick. That shit is dangerous. 

“Sorry,” you whisper, but you aren’t, and you wait until it’s perfectly silent before you do it on purpose - loud like a porn star. You took theatre, you know your shit. 

You can feel the poor boy’s pain, because you can feel just about everything, and his dick is throbbing in his pants.

You smile serenely, though he doesn’t see it. 

He calls you fucker and that, incredibly, is what does it, and you curse most splendidly into the chilly night air. It’s January, but your apartment doesn’t pay for heating. You’re actually sort of glad he’s here. Most nights you’re cold. 

Though you do miss your bed. 

All things considered, you decide he’s been good enough to warrant a blowjob, which is a real treat because you’re basically the best at head, just like you are at cooking (you make the marinara sauce by hand) and although you get the impression that he pulls on your hair to be cantankerous, it strikes you as endearing, in the grand scheme of things. He’s not as loud as you are, but he does talk a lot, and when he calls you that ridiculous nickname (ED erectile dysfunction eggplant dumpster fuck EVERYTHING what a shitty nickname to have) you dig your nails into his thigh and pull away to tell him that if he doesn’t address you by your actual fucking name you’ll get up and sleep in the bathtub. 

He’s lying on his back on the floor and although you’ve never done it quite like this, it’s not a hard change to adjust to. Mostly you just suck in your cheeks and bob your head; he likes that. Not because it feels better, but because you look stupid doing it. He’s told you before. Sometimes he takes a handful of your hair and makes like he’s gonna jerk your head himself, only he never does, but he fools you every time. 

It’s easier to swallow than it is to spit everything out on the goddamn carpet, meaning one of you would have to clean it later, and it sure wouldn’t be you. And since having semen on your carpet is basically a sign that you’re white trash, you swallow. He calls you “good boy” and you almost punch him. 

You unzip the sleeping bag so it’s like a blanket and you put it over both of you. You rest your head on his chest. You dare him to complain.

He drapes an arm around you and you’re a little ashamed that you like it. 

Friends with benefits aren’t really this intimate. You guess you’re kind of a special case, the two of you. 

You fall asleep like that, on top of him and covered in sweat and smelling like sex instead of seafood. Your glasses are akimbo. 

You fall asleep to him running his hand through your hair. Your last thought before drifting off into unconsciousness is that, probably, he was a little bit drunk, too. 

Yes, you are quite enamored with your fuck-buddy roommate.

But you weren’t always.


End file.
